If you want to organise other games please go ahead using the same topic to consolidate all the information in one place and hopefully get more games together within our community. These games are for PvP, PvAI & PvPvAIso come along and we'll get some games going!

Lore:We know some of you guys love to role play whilst using Distant Stars, and here's a topic for you guys to post all of your role playing stories, character profiles and anything else you can imagine.

Maps:Some of you avid map makers out there have produced some great maps but never really had them recognised because they've got lost. Well here's a topic for you to post a link to the download (we can even provide mirrors if necessary) a screenshot or two of the map for us all the preview and if enough people like it we'll even include the map in with the actual mod!

Please visit our website and for more information, change logs, downloads, and to report bugs. Our website can be found here: http://distantstars.mmobase.com

Please include as much information as possible, if you have an error log feel free to post it on these forums and we'll take it from there. If you can reproduce the error please include the error log (read below to find out how to enable error logs) and include as much detail on how to reproduce the problem.

Open the user.setting file (using Notepad, Wordpad or any text editor) and scroll down to the bottom 7 lines from the bottom is the line:LogOutput FALSEChange FALSE to TRUELogOutput TRUE

and from then on any Log files will be saved to the debug folder:Windows Vista/Windows 7: C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Windows Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\DebugorWindows XP: C:\Documents and settings\<Your Windows Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Debug

If you get these log files to us (you can just paste them in to a forum post) we can hopefully get your issues sorted.

Frequently Asked Questions

All files are compressed using 7Zip to shrink the download filesize. To extract these files you must use WinRAR or 7Zip.Any Patches should overwrite the original install directory, either by extracting over the original folder, or cut/copy & pasting over the existing file/folder structure.

1) My game keeps crashing, is there anything I can do to stop it?i) Are you running the game on maximum (highest) settings? if so, lower them to High or Medium, there is a known issue with the game using up too much memory, there is nothing we can do about this, also no matter how powerful your pc is, it is affected by this issue no matter the pc it is not above this crashing issue, it is a game problem not a hardware one, so quite simply lower your settings. If you still have an issue with crashing see point two.ii) Give us as detailed information as possible about the crash, what was happening at the time of the crash, what races, ships, abilities were involved. If you can supply a Debug Log (see above for more information about logging) and post a bug report on our website.

2) The loading screens and portrait pictures dont appear properly, whats wrong?i) This is an issue with ATI based graphics cards (rarely affects Nvidia based cards) we're looking in to the issue.

3) Why dont you support converting Distant Stars in to TXT format?i) Quite simply many things can go wrong with converting your mod to TXT, we cant help you with something you've probably broken yourself.

4) Can I mod Distant Stars for myself?i) Yes you can however please do not distribute our mod or our mod that you have edited to the public. You must ask for permission to do so, we will regrettably stop distributing our mod to all if users abuse our work.

5) Your mod is in BIN format I can't edit the files, what can I do?i) You can convert the mod to TXT format however we wont offer any support to versions of the mod that have been converted to TXT.

6) Why is Distant Stars distributed in BIN format?i) Mods load faster in BIN format and are less likely to have issues in this format.

8) Is there any way to make new maps for Distant Stars using GalaxyForge?i) Within the Distant Stars Extras folder there is a folder called Galaxy Forge, Copy and Paste this folder (or its contents) over your original Galaxy Forge folder (or its contents) replacing any files if it asks you to. When you start Galaxy Forge next you'll be able to use all of our planets.

Or, the DIY approach (without custom icons):

ii) The GalaxyForge supplied by the devs will still work with our Mod, however to be able to access all of our planetary bonuses, templates, planet types and stars you will need to take our GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef (found in the GameInfo folder of the mod) and place it in to your GalaxyForge folder, overwriting the original GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef (if you still wish to make maps for the original game keep a backup of the original file). This will allow you to use all of the Galaxy changes included in our mod.

Note: Any maps made for Distant Stars will not work with other Mods. See #8.2 for DIY instructions for map making or take the appropriate files from Entrenchment, they're cross-client compatible.

Some statistics...

Since August 2009 to February 2011 we have had over...

400,000 Unique visits to the website12,000GB (12TB) of data transferred from our website

That equates to over 60,000 Unique downloads of the entire mod, excluding the excess of 20,000 Patches downloaded.

Thanks to everyone that has supported us this far and making our mod as popular as it is!

Sorry, I put in the wrong URL. I fixed it. As for the asteroid count, I think someone will have to put that into the wiki, but it may be a bit. Lotta planets and I don't know who is keeping track of that coding.

I know the variables but I didn't put them in the wiki because they're somewhat random. Moons have 0 - 2 resource asteroids, dwarf and normal have 2 - 4 resource asteroids, and huge have 4 - 6 resource asteroids. Paradise planets don't follow that rule, gas giants right now have 2 - 4 but that may change in the future, and 'home' planets always have 2 of each.

Edit:

And the DS wiki has everything you're looking for and then some. I may go back and add in that little blurb, but it's not really that important. Any questions forge or map related PM me and I'll have an answer for you.

Help! I downloaded the vanilla version, put it into the folder you say, but there isn't any galaxy folder into the zip! And if I enable the mod, the music changes, in my desktop appears a message and then it says that Sins has detected a problem and needs to close. The message is:

Saved MiniDump

and there appears the location (I can't copy-paste here)

What happens??

Another question: is Ironclad/Stardock going to sell Entrenchment and Diplomacy as disks, instead of digital purchase? Because I'm not going to buy online yet.

still not guaranteed to work quite right. not quite sure where we left off from development of it. we are almost done with Entrenchment and Diplomacy did not give too many things to change so hopefully that won't take us nearly as long and we can get to updating the vanilla version soon. sorry for the issues

Indeed there is a "Blame Ryat" forum game, which is why I told Alpharius to blame you, since everyone else is doing it. Blaming Ryat is now the cool thing to do, just like smoking used to be.

BTW Alpharius, nice name, the Alpha Legion is my favorite of all the Traitor Legions due to their use of tactics and sneaky-ness almost to the level of Tactical Genius (but not quite Tactical Genius, the Alpha Legion can't make Baneblades pop out from behind bushes).

The vanilla version is not fully supported up to 1.191 yet, and thats why

as for the Entrenchment and Diplomacy on disks themselves, I understand that to be never but you can buy all three on a disk with Trinity

Nope, the trinity disk comes with vanilla sins and two codes preentered on the impulse install for you to download both entrenchment and diplomacy. However, once you have them downloaded, just like everyone else here, you can dig through your hard drive and save the files to a disk. I believe there is documentation on where to look included with impulse, or maybe on it's online help even... I've looked it up before. It's there, just takes some detective work to find it.

Help! I downloaded the vanilla version, put it into the folder you say, but there isn't any galaxy folder into the zip! And if I enable the mod, the music changes, in my desktop appears a message and then it says that Sins has detected a problem and needs to close. The message is:

Saved MiniDump

and there appears the location (I can't copy-paste here)

What happens??

Another question: is Ironclad/Stardock going to sell Entrenchment and Diplomacy as disks, instead of digital purchase? Because I'm not going to buy online yet.

There was a 1.16 version? Didn't know that, I probably do know and just don't remember, and there's no mod folder for version 1.16... You sure you got the right version? At any rate, whatever your version of the game, if you look in the location of C:\Users\(logon name)\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire you will find a bunch of folders that say version numbers and mod on them. Unzip Distant Stars to your desktop, then move the files over to the appropriate folder to prevent possible corruption issues. Also turn your game effects settings down from anything but highest. I keep forgetting to remind Carbon to put that in big bold letters at the top of the downloads, so someone remind me to remember. Since you get a music change, you probably got that part right though.

There is a way to get the game to work with version 1.191, there are copies floating around that work, if you ask nicely, I may provide you with one such version so you can fully update your game and get a lot of the fun stuff, however, to really experience DS, you really do need to at least get entrenchment. Diploamcy is a plus and you can join us in the weekly game which starts in about 50 minutes. Sweet!

Galaxy folder what now? You don't need to do anything with a galaxy folder... There are actually 3 folders that you'd be interested in finding if you're looking for the galaxy files. The first is (if you're in the location I listed a couple seconds ago) the one that says GalaxyForge, the second is the one that says MapDesigner, and the third is buried a little further in, in the mod itself, but I don't recommend messing with it, you really don't need to.

As for being able to copy and paste on the forums, learn keyboard short cuts. They're less convenient then mouse clicks, but a hell of a lot more useful since you can't disable them. ctrl+x is cut ctrl+c is copy and ctrl+v is paste.

I already answered about the disks, but I will say that online commerce is far more secure today then it was 10 years ago. I remember having to download an add on pack for Netscape back in the day to bring it's security up to 128 bit and having to sign a waiver that said some BS about not trying to participate in criminal activity or whatever... Someone had a comedian working for them 'cause it was just funny. All browsers now come standard with it, and have so for years. The only time people become victims of online fraud is when they're duped into entering in their information on a site that isn't the one they thought they were at. As long as you see that little lock icon in the address bar and you are where you're supposed to be, no one can steal your info from you unless you've already been hacked or they're hacking the main server that's verifying your info for the purchase. I say buy and download away. Odds are you'll get hit by a car before someone rips you off from because they stole your info from Stardock. Maybe you'll get hit twice, by then hopefully you won't give a damn about your credit cards an have started looking both ways before you cross the street.

This mod is fantastic, and as longtime forum lurker, but little poster for four years...that shows you how much I enjoy this work. I tweak each mod for some house rules of mine, but only to try and make the AI even more brutal.

I'm working on a video to reflect this modification, right now the game I have in progress has had an ongoing battle between myself and an AI for over one hour in the same planetary system. Video is now completed, see second link. A small asteroid cluster named Charybdis is a juncture point for four other jump lanes. In this hours worth of combat I've lost more than 10 capital ships, and hundreds of frigates, thousands of fighters...the computer will not stop.

...smack dab in the middle of all this have been insanely powerful pirate raids (with cap ships), one raid even came to Charybdis!

I don't know how y'all have done it - but you've made SoaSE even better than it already was.

To summarize, the AI has been kicking my tail around the Charybdis system for over ninety-minutes...yes, they have not withdrawn. They keep pouring more and more ships into the system. I estimate I've lost the following:10+ Capital Ships200+ FrigatesDozens of support structuresThousands of fighter craft

I recently deployed every cap ship I have into the area, however...the super pirates are launching a massive attack along the other side of my Empire. I'm holding them off, but they toasted most of my orbital facilities, while decimating my reserve fleet. I can't spare any cap ships to fight the pirates, so I'm fending them off with hordes of frigates, cruisers, and fighters. Thankfully my economy can support replacements - however I may run out of time in the end. 4 vicious AI + super pirates = deadly combination.

Well, the version is 1.165, as it appears at the right-down corner of the game menu.

Thank you about offering me the 1.19 version , but if I upgrade it I'll loose me Sins Plus mod (1.165 version). Better I buy Trinity and get Entrenchment and Dipomacy by that way, because I cannot use most of this page's mods because of that . Without at least Entrenchment, but having that 1.19 version, what could I do? I'm talking about mods, of course

When you run this mod, it's best not to have any other mods running. So if you're trying to run this, as well as Sins plus on top of it, you're running the same mod twice basically and that could be why it crashed right away. You're probably breaking something forcing it to crash.

So before you upgrade or do anything, try one more time. Download a fresh copy of DS, unzip it to your desktop, and then move the DS v1.01 folder into your mod folder.

Run your game, disable all mods currently running and hit apply so the checksum reads 0 and you're running plain old vanilla sins. Then enable the DS mod and the DS mod only. hit control+shift+tab to put the game in windowed mode so you can see and verify the checksum 453701567 If it's the same then hit apply. You're running a version that should work with what's there. if it doesn't there may be other things to try to get it to work, but we need more information on what it says in the log file.

Edit:Update for those who want to create an update disk of entrenchment and/or diplomacy for their own personal records.

If you load up impulse and go to the tab 'My Games' you can right click on your game and select the option archive. This will compress all of the files associated with that version of the game. For instance, if you wanted to back up the current version of diplomacy, you'd right click on it, select archive, and every file that is used to upgrade sins entrenchment to diplomacy will get stored in a file labeled 'Sins of a Solar Empire - Diplomacy1.011.068_3.17.2010.impulse' This is just a file archive (7zip can access everything in it easily) of all of the update files, i.e. what you'd get on an update disk. If you let impulse store everything in it's default locations your file will be located at 'C:\ProgramData\Stardock\Impulse\backup' If nothing is there then access impulse's preferences and select the options for folders and look to see where it's saving it to. All you have to do at that point is save it or a copy of it elsewhere. This does not save any mods or saved games or playbacks or anything like that, you'll have to get into your mods folder area and make copies of those. Just thought I'd share since I looked it up again.

News Flash: Due to monetary injections and mission assignments in Diplomacy with this mod, my brother now has 400+ pirate caps and innumerable support cruisers in orbit of their base. All vessels are diverted away from this region for reasons of lag.

Glad someone finally got it. People discussing vanilla Sins mistakenly think the bomber issue is due to Scamble Bombers being OP. No, a critical mass of bombers will beat anything in the game right now. Even an equal supply of carriers with fighters or flak. There's been some unit with this status since the game was released; Ironclad doesn't seem to be very good at balancing things.